Wild Duck to Bounty Hunter: India Inc's designations get quirky, not always for the better

With all the corporate sounding titles having been taken and done to death with, given theCEOs, CFOs, CTOs, President, Vice President and what-have-you, young India Inc is coming out with quirky, easy to be mistaken titles that leave you wondering if you are calling for a gardener, mechanic or worse, a radical in an organisation.

In a bid to get quirky and stand out in the plethora of same-sounding titles, corporate Indiahas invented titles - some of which will elicit a laughand others that willleave you looking in askance.

Quirky titles in Corporate India is a not a new phenomenon though. Bangalore-based Mindtree Consulting Co-Founder Subroto Bagchi has been calling himself ‘Gardener’ for a long time now.

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IBM has its talent pool-people who come with new ideas beingcalled `wild ducks'. Wild? Pray why? Perhaps it alludes to out-of-box ideas or to collective noise made by them which reminds the management of ducks going wild when they rush to grab food thrown at them.

Another lovable title wasthat of ‘slave driver’. Isn’t that how some refer to theirbosses, anyway?

The term ‘serial entrepreneurs’ is used to refer to peoplewho set up companies, make themsuccessful and then exit them. Alok Kejriwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Games2Win is often referred to as a serial entrepreneur. In his organisation there are quite a few interesting sounding titles.

For instance, there is a Chief Trafficking Officer, who manages network traffic. Then there is a Bounty Hunter, who in normal parlance is a Purchase Officer. His job here is to make successful bids for games and buy them for the company.

“I cannot call him a purchase officer as he does more than just buy games,” says Kejriwal.

Linkedin also has some pretty unusual designations. For instance, some employees are called evangelists and it’s not because they’re religious. The term technology evangelist was the brainwave of Mike Murray of Apple Computer’s Macintosh division while he was referring to adopting new ways of technology.

Rainmaker was a term used about a decadeago to refer to the head of sales, given that it indicatesthat the company’s products or services are in demand and money is raining on the company. Then there was the designation of ‘Chief Disruptive Officer’ whose job it is to move past being merely innovative and disrupt the status quo.

But do these oh-what-does-this-mean titles serve their purpose? Most people are unable to understand what the term means beyond its original meaning. For example the designation:Fundamentalist. What does it mean other than the dark overtones the word popularly conveys?

Come on, India Inc. Make it simple. We don’t want to double check that phone diary or look up the internet before we dial for the HR aka Hunting (for) Prey or Good Luck Officers.